Dear people, I am making a music song with a piano sample, is it smart to also buy redux and what are the advantages?
no need for redux if you already have renoise, unless you want to use a renoise instrument/phrase section in another daw. Stacking redux within renoise doesn’t confer any advantage, at least none that I am aware of
Hey…Redux is the Renoise sampler as a VST. With Redux you can make Renoise songs in other DAWs. It’s like Renoise as a plugin.
There is no greater advantage to use both together, Renoise can already do anything that Redux can. Of course you can still use Redux from Renoise, just load it as an instrument plugin. Maybe there are some exotic things you could do with both together, but it’s not what people would commonly do.
Personally I do have some very real use cases for Redux inside Renoise. It kind of gives me more options for my instruments and can help to mitigate some of Renoise’s shortcomings, e.g.
phrases of phrases
Renoise’s sampler is great, but it is not really suited for creating complex multi-layered intruments with different articulation options etc. as you can do in samplers like Kontakt. You basically have to decide if you want overlapping samples as round robins (cycle, random) or if you want to have e.g. macro-controlled articulation/sound variants (play all, but have a different modulation set for every layer of which the volume/mix could then be controlled by a macro) - you unfortunately can’t have both at the same time.
For this purpose I sometimes just abuse phrases. I l distribute my “layers” of samples across different octaves (really wish there were more than 10) of the keyzone editor (where I can then have round robins per note) and create a phrase where I trigger the root notes of all octaves simulaneously and map the phrase to my desired keyzone range. The macros control which of the layers of audible. That way I get “Play all” and “Cycle” together. The only hard limit is the number of macro knobs and octaves, which is not very generous unfortunately.
With this approach I lose the ability to use phrases for anything else, like real phrases, though. Luckily, if I just load my instrument inside Redux inside Renoise, the instrument becomes a black box and I can have a fresh set of phrases for the plugin instrument, which itself already contains phrases. Not ideal, but it works for me most of the time.
combining instruments
Unfortunately, there is no elegant way to trigger multiple intruments by the same note from a track or the pc keyboard and have them play in unison. For this purpose, I sometimes use Carla Patchbay in an instrument slot and inside it just route two or more instances of Redux together, so they get triggered by the same event. Still wished there were some native options inside Renoise to do that and avoid the plugin overhead.
I also sometimes use this technique to combine instruments using the pluggin grabber on the combined renoise instances, because there’s no real way to do that in Renoise. There are tools, but I found them to be not very useful for what I need to do most of the time.
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